Laptop Advice

Hiya S&T frens!

I have about $600 to spend on a laptop and I'm not sure what to buy? I'm going off to college soon so I'll need to do basic stuff on that. Besides that, I'm an avid graphic designer plus I do coding so I need some space for that. I honestly always thought I'd get some help from my parents for a nice MacBook but plans get derailed. I appreciate all comments!

Since you are a graphic designer, do you prefer your laptop screen to be touchscreen? May be a little over your budget but I just want to know if you prefer having this perk or not.

Anyway, I would definitely go for a larger screen laptop as well as a powerhouse processor...at least an intel i3 or i5.

Well, it depends on exactly what graphic designing you intend to do, but for the general run-of-the-mill graphic design processing power > everything. If you need to be able to multitask and switch apps flawlessly whilst doing this then you'll need to invest some more towards ram, which will cut out of your processing budget. Then you've got the number crunching and rendering aspect, which will run much better through a gpu than a cpu, so that's another aspect. So if you're hardcore rendering 3D images which takes a lot of calculating, you may want to switch from focussing on cpu to gpu, however this could put you over budget. It's important to know exactly what it is you want to do, to tailor a computer to your needs. Nonetheless, with the requirements you listed in mind, I'd go for a cpu heavy laptop with a large screen that falls a bit under budget, and invest in a large graphics tablet if you dont have one already. If you do, then the remaining money can go towards a better cpu; I recommend no less than an i5 that is not an M-type intel (they're made to run much slower, for laptops, but wont help you in what you want to do), or the amd equivalent. You can forget about a gpu, since I don't think you're rendering a bunch of 3D objects all day every day, no?